Cumulative Deterrence and it's implementations to the War against ...

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Pact allies. The threat of mutual assured destruction made the notion of a nuclear first strike unthinkable. Thus, confronted with horrific images of a “nuclear winter,” the superpowers, while nevertheless continuing to build up their nuclear arsenals to staggering heights over the next half century, stopped short of giving the order to unleash even one of these fearsome weapons. Although both the United States and the Soviet Union would engage in “proxy wars” throughout the Cold War, the threat that any of these could escalate into a nuclear exchange was a constant reminder of the awesome destructive power of these two formidable adversaries. Scholars frequently define deterrence in dichotomic terms. For Patrick Morgan, deterrence is “the use of threats of harm to prevent someone from doing something you do not want him to.” 3 Yehoshaphat Harkabi defines deterrence as the “threat of heavy punishment for an act by the enemy in order to persuade him to desist from that act.” 4 Zeev Maoz sees deterrence as “a policy through which one attempts to scare off a would-be attacker by holding out a drawn sword. It works as long as the sword is not being used. When the sword becomes covered with blood, deterrence is said to have failed, no matter whose blood was spilled.” 5 These and other standard definitions of deterrence share a common assumption: deterrence is successful so long as aggression does not take place; failure is the occurrence of a single violent act. In writing about the effectiveness of the threat of nuclear retaliation during the Cold War, two other highly respected scholars, Alexander George and Richard Smoke, assert that although “‘massive retaliation’ was one enormously potent threat, it often lacked enough credibility and relevance to deter some types of challenges to deterrence commitments made by the United States on behalf of its foreign policy interests.” 6 In some cases, a weaker adversary might adopt what George and Smoke refer to as the “designing around” appproach. 7 According to this approach an enemy that recognizes its operational limitations vis-à-vis a militarily superior opponent will readjust its tactics and operations to play to its strengths. 8 Examples include the 3. Patrick M. Morgan, Deterrence: A Conceptual Analysis (London: Sage, 1977), p. 17. 4. Yehoshaphat Harkabi, War and Strategy (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Israel Ministry of Defense, 1990), p. 221. 5. Zeev Maoz, Paradoxes of War: On the Art of National Self-Entrapment (Boston: Unwin Hyman 1990), p. 65. 6. Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, “Deterrence and Foreign Policy,” World Politics, vol. 41, no. 2 (January 1989), p. 177. 7. Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 38–45, 519–522. See also Doron Almog, “The West Bank Fence: A Vital Component in Israel’s Strategy of Defense,” Special Studies on Palestinian Politics and the Peace Process, Research Memorandum no. 47 (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004), pp. 13–15. See also http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubs/working/almog.doc, pp. 9–10. 8. Almog, “The West Bank Fence”; and http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubs/working/almog.doc. 4
use of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, the 1968–70 War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel along the Suez Canal, and Hezbollah’s operational shift against Israel following the latter’s pullout from southern Lebanon in May 2000. The cumulative deterrence model, discussed in the next section, posits an explanation of enduring conventional conflicts that do not fit within the classical deterrence model for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most significant reason is that it assumes from the beginning that there will be repeated breaches of the first line of security. 9 The model builds on the work of George and Smoke, among others. 10 CUMULATIVE DETERRENCE Unlike classical deterrence as practiced during the Cold War, and whose success hinged on a bipolar standoff that held in check any impulse to launch a nuclear first strike, cumulative deterrence is based on the simultaneous use of threats and military force over the course of an extended conflict. Some scholars argue that such a strategy is not deterrence at all, and therefore oppose the notion that deterrence can be cumulative. One such scholar is Jack Levy, who criticizes Zeev Maoz’s methodology for measuring the effectiveness of deterrence: “Maoz’s definition of success and failure,” according to Levy, “is not appropriate for the analysis of the success or failure of deterrent threats. A dispute which escalates to war is coded as a success for that side which wins the war militarily. This may be useful for the theoretical questions he is asking, but from the perspective of deterrence, such an outcome should be treated as failure.” 11 Thus, Levy employs the same dichotomic criteria for assessing the effectiveness of deterrence as scholars writing about classical deterrence. Paul Huth and Bruce Russett, the first scholars to offer a definition of long-term, regional conflict, measure the volume of conflict using statistical methods. 12 In their study, Huth and 9. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Warfare of the Armed Forces of the United States, Joint Doctrine, Capstone and Keystone Primer, May 30, 1995, p. 1. 10. For more on the designing around phenomenon, see Janice Gross Stein, “Calculation, Miscalculation, and Convention Deterrence I: The View from Cairo,” in Robert Jervis Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 34–59; and Elli Lieberman, “Deterrence Theory: Success or Failure in Arab-Israeli Wars?” McNair Paper no. 45 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, October 1995). 11. Jack S. Levy, “When Do Deterrent Threats Work?” British Journal of Political Science, October 1988, p. 493. 12. I employed a similar method in Doron Almog, “Israel's Deterrence Strategy as a Model for Accumulating Deterrence,” Studies http://www.tau.ac.il/jcss/bulletin/bulletin23-24.pdf. (This work was awarded the Tshetshik Prize for Strategic Studies on Israel's Security from Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.) 5
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